Children learning words face at least one challenge, maybe two. First, children must gather enough information to identify which concept maps to which word (a linguistic bottleneck). Second, for this mapping to be possible, children may need to acquire the concept itself if it is not already available (a conceptual bottleneck). We investigate whether children face both challenges or only the first when learning the English words for negation, a concept that is abstract and non-referential, yet universal across human thought and languages. We tested whether a linguistic bottleneck is sufficient to explain how children learn to express negation by comparing negation production in typical English-learners and older internationally-adopted preschoolers, who are more conceptually mature but face a similar language-learning task. If infants normally face a conceptual bottleneck, older adoptees, who do not, should learn negation faster. If the only bottleneck is linguistic, the two groups should learn negation at the same rate relative to their acquisition of English. In Study 1, parent reports on the CDI showed that older international adoptees and language-matched infant first-language learners begin producing no and not at the same point in vocabulary growth. Study 2 examined children’s production of logical denial uses of negation words in longitudinal corpora of parent-child interactions. Adopted preschoolers’ and language-matched infants’ production of denials increased at the same rate relative to the mean length of children’s utterances. Matching patterns of negation acquisition in internationally-adopted preschoolers and first-language-learning infants support a solely linguistic, not conceptual, bottleneck on learning negation words.
preprintFutrell & Mahowald argue LM success suggests humans may learn language entirely through domain-general statistical mechanisms. However, children differ crucially from LMs in their ability to surpass their input, their language learning trajectory, and the presence of a critical period. Until LMs account for these phenomena, it remains possible that human language acquisition is supported by innate, language-specific learning mechanisms.
preprintIn order to learn the meanings of words, children must solve two potentially separable tasks: to learn the mappings between words and their meanings, and to learn the concepts that underlie those meanings. This chapter examines the acquisition of negation by taking each of these tasks in turn. We argue that children's limited early uses of negation words reflect limited early meanings, but that the slow emergence of logical negation can be fully explained by the difficulty of learning the linguistic mappings, without the need to appeal to additional conceptual difficulty. Further, we argue that children are in possession of at least a precursor to the concept of logical negation—contrary—by 17 months. Even so, it remains possible that some conceptual development occurs between when children first use the word "no", and when they finally learn its truth-functional logical meaning, and we spell out a proposal for how the logically limited concept contrary could contribute to the construction of the concept negation. Finally, to test the possibility that language itself plays a role in the construction of negation, we propose that future work compare children's acquisition of negation across languages with varying mappings between words and meanings.
preprint publisher downloadPrevious research has suggested several stages for children’s production of negation. Some researchers have argued that the order of morpheme production follows a "no-not-n't" cline. Others have hypothesized stages where "no" appears outside the sentence and a stage where "can't" and "don't" are learned as unanalyzed wholes because "can" and "do" are not produced separately. In this study we bring more corpus data and novel analyses to bear on these hypotheses. The results suggest that "no" is produced earlier but "not" and "n't" are produced around the same time. We do not find evidence for a presentential stage or a stage where negative auxiliaries like "can't" and "don't" are produced without the positive forms like "can" and "do". Our findings are compatible with simultaneous development of frequent negative forms with a production bottleneck that favors shorter utterances like "no" to appear earlier.
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